Investment Instructions for Your Partner: A Brisbane Parent’s Plan for Shares, ETFs and Crypto

You’re raising kids in Brisbane, and somewhere across the last decade you’ve accumulated a CommSec parcel, a couple of ETFs through a micro-investing app, a small CoinSpot holding from 2021, and maybe a hardware wallet in the back of a drawer. Your partner has a vague idea this exists. If something happened to you tomorrow, they’d be guessing — and your kids are the ones who’d wear the cost of whatever got missed.

The problem

Australian investment portfolios are scattered across brokers, exchanges, micro-investing platforms and wallets, with no central registry. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on crypto-assets is explicit: crypto sits largely outside consumer protections, and if keys are lost the holdings are effectively unrecoverable. The same fragmentation applies to small CHESS-sponsored share parcels (identified by HIN) and issuer-sponsored holdings (identified by SRN) — an executor cannot claim what they cannot prove existed.

For a parent with dependants, this isn’t an abstract estate-planning concern. It’s the difference between your partner being able to consolidate a portfolio for the kids’ benefit, and your partner spending the first six months after a death paying a probate lawyer to chase ghosts. Your partner doesn’t need your CommSec password or your seed phrase. They need an inventory: which broker, which exchange, which HIN, which wallet exists, and where the recovery materials are physically stored (so they can be located through proper legal process — not handed over via an app).

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per investment line: the issuer or platform name (CommSec, Stake, Vanguard, CoinSpot, Independent Reserve), the account or member identifier, your HIN or SRN for direct shareholdings, the broker contact channel, and notes about where physical documentation or hardware lives (e.g. “hardware wallet in the home safe; recovery card in the bank safety deposit box”).

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your keys, recovery phrases, or hardware wallet PINs. It does not hold exchange passwords, two-factor seeds, broker logins, or any credential. Your partner sees the inventory you’ve prepared for them, only when you’ve released it.

That boundary matters. The Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not financial advice. It’s an instructions register — which is what keeps it outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC AML/CTF reporting obligations.

How it works

  1. You add each investment line to your vault — broker or exchange name, account identifier, HIN or SRN, and a plain-language note (“this is the ETF I started for the kids in 2020”).
  2. For crypto, you record only what exists and where the recovery materials physically live. The vault never asks for seed phrases, private keys, or PINs.
  3. You name your partner as the recipient for the investments module and they accept (the vault records their consent).
  4. If something happens, your partner is notified per your release rules and sees only the investments instructions module — not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your partner takes the inventory to the executor or directly to each broker/exchange with a death certificate. They can confirm what existed, rule out wasted searches, and process consolidation through proper legal channels.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane has a high share of self-directed retail investors — concentrated in mining-adjacent shareholdings, ETF accumulators from the post-2018 cohort, and crypto holdings opened during the 2020–21 retail wave. For a parent of dependants, an undiscovered $8,000 CoinSpot balance or a forgotten BHP parcel isn’t a rounding error — it’s months of school fees, or the gap between what the life-insurance payout covers and what your kids actually need. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills and estate planning makes clear that beneficiaries can only inherit what the executor can identify and claim. A clear instruction set is the single highest-leverage thing a Brisbane parent can do for their partner before anything goes wrong.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Brisbane parents

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents in Brisbane can register their first investments module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your keys, recovery phrases, or hardware wallet PINs.